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It describes how to take your Facebook Events, and get them into Google Calendar, then you can get them synchronised to you mobile device using Google Sync (I’ve done that last bit already.) This will save a bit of a headache.

I was prompted to look for this by the recent upgrade to the iPhone Facebook App, which now provides contact synchronisation with your Contacts on the phone. The problem I found wihth this though is that it’s very non-descriptive as to what it actually synchronises.

According to several newsgroup posts, it only synchronises the profile photo to the contact, and even then it overwrites the ones that you choose. So I went looking for a better solution, and found this diversion.

When I opened up Mail.app it asked me for her email address, and then suggested a POP3 server address with “.plus.” in the address. I wanted her to use IMAP as she uses the email on her phone and wants to continue with that.

Looking up the IMAP information was quite easy, and I was also able to copy the information from her mobile as well.

Unfortunately, nothing that I tried actually worked – even though those settings worked fine on her mobile.

It turns out, that Yahoo! don’t want you to access your email from your computer, unless you are willing to pay for it – with their “Plus” service.

Except that it works on her phone….

And the reason is…. Because Yahoo! filter access by IP range. Seriously. I’m not kidding.

That’s right, Yahoo! are strapped for cash, so don’t want you accessing your email, apart from on your mobile, because that drives you to their site. Shame that’s now kind of driving my girlfriend away from them towards Google…..

For the past few days, I’ve been trying to update and clear out my GMail contact list so that I could sync it to my phone.

Yesterday, I achieve my clean-up goals, and so this morning I backed up my contacts onto my Mac and turned on the contact sync’ing.

Looking on the Google website, it says that to only synchronise the ‘My Contacts’ group, you should chose to delete all of the contacts on your iPhone, otherwise the ‘All Contacts’ group is sync’d. I dutifully deleted all of the contacts because I had spent time sorting out the groups.

Once I turned the sync’ing on, I went to see what Contacts I had, and to my surprise, there were none! I wasn’t worried too much as I could restore them from my Mac, but that wouldn’t be for a few days.

Half an hour later, I went back and checked again and everything had finally synchronised, so there wasn’t a problem. If you get into the same situation, I guess the advice is not to panic, and to leave your phone to do it’s thing for a while!

One thing I didn’t pay attention to was the ‘Favourites’ option – I have a handfull of people in that list and it cones in handy. Fortunately, after the sync, the favourites list is preserved and are mapped to the same named contacts from Google.

However, I have noticed that I have contacts from my ‘All Contacts’ group in the list, so it looks like the advice on Google’s website might be wrong.

Well, I’ve spent a bit of time working with the Google synchronising on my iPhone that I spoke about recently, so I thought I should probably post an update to tell you how I’ve got on.

Well, the Calendar sync’ing is bloody fantastic. I’ve started to get my arse in gear and get my life slightly more organised, and it’s really helping. There is a slight delay in the synchronising, a 10-15 seconds at most, I’d guess, but other than that, it’s perfect. The only downside that I’ve found is that I have recently been playing with some of the lab features of Google Calendar, specifically, the calendar which shows you the birthdays of my Google Contacts and the ToDo List calendars. The Contacts list calendar is transferred to my phone, but the ToDo list isn’t. I’m guessing that that is more to do with Google not sharing it, rather than the iPhone not capable of receiving it.

At the time I set up the synchronisation, I did not enable the contact synchronising, as the contacts on my phone are far more up-to-date. In the inbetween time, I’ve been busy updating my Google contacts, but they still aren’t completely updated, so I still need some time before I can switch that on. However, I did discover that I can already search the contacts and view them on my phone, by using the Contacts App, and pressing the back arrow at the top left of the screen. I can then see the contacts on my phone and my Google contacts.

Finally, and most excitingly, Google have now activated the mail synchronisation, and you can get Push email from Google to your phone. Now, I’m wondering whether this is particularly useful. I retrieve emails from my GMail account using IMAP, I receive updates from that every 15 minutes or so (a preference that I chose, but it could be sooner.) In most cases, that is sufficient for my needs, if I needed it to be faster, I can change the checking interval. The major advantage of Push Email is that you receive it almost immediately. The major disadvantage is that it keeps a constant connection and therefore it drains the battery life of the phone much quicker. So, is it worth it? For me, no, but then I don’t need near instant access to my GMail account – and maybe you should consider that too before you turn it on.

Basically, I wanted to get my calendars on Google Calendar synchronised with my iPhone (because really, my google calendar is my main calendar) and seeing as iPhone OS 3.0 supports the CalDAV standard, it should be a piece of piss.

Anyway. Turns out, you can add the calendar quite easily by following these instructions

Turns out, Google have implemented an Exchange Server which lets you synchronise Calendar items and Contacts with your account.

Reading between the lines, you have to be careful regarding the contacts in your GMail account, as possibly they end up on your iPhone and any contacts on your iPhone end up on GMail. It sounds like you can turn that off, but actually it sounds quite useful too. The added plus of that is, if you change the contacts in GMail, they should synchronise back to Address Book on your Mac once you plug you iPhone back in. So, one address book to rule them all.

The added plus is, you get all of your calendars on you iPhone and you can add and remove items to your hearts content!